Examples: Long ago, the writer heard Bjarne Stroustrup himself complain that "object-oriented" had become a marketing synonym for "good". Many clichés have coursed through the culvert since then, and now it has become a coded term for "old-fashioned" - which is pretty much the same as "bad", to one decimal place.

It is not enough, then, for a speaker to speak in buzzing-words and fizzing-phrases. The key is to be aware of how much of their credibility remains to be spent, and to avoid worn-out terms loaded with non-technical debt.

Here is a small kut-out-'n'-keep table of examples, current as of writing, to get you started:

Buzziness of Buzzwords, May 2012

Jargon

Credibility
(1.0 best, -1.0 worst)

agile

-0.17

design by contract

-0.82

data-driven

-0.76

fluent

0.97

functional

0.95

injection

0.65

inside-out/outside-in

0.32

lightweight

0.57

native

0.81

object-oriented

-0.84

pattern

-0.13

performant

-0.21

pushback

0.77

seam

0.93

technical debt

0.16

test-driven

0.12

top-down/bottom-up

-0.72

unit test (as noun)

0.36

unit test (as verb)

0.43

virtual

-0.53

Observation:What's that Sooty? This whole article depends on the jargon word "pattern", and you have shown it to be a spent force?